Front Row TV Season Ordering Solution

If you use a Snow Leopard (or possible Leopard) machine as your media centre and you rip your own TV stuff into iTunes, you may have puzzled over why TV shows seasons that sequence correctly show up in Front Row in a random order, particularly if you’ve not added stuff to your library in the order it was originally released.

Leopard’s Front Row annoyed a few users by changing the organisation scheme from…

TV Shows ->

The Avengers ->

Season 1

Season 2

Season 3 etc.

…to…

TV Shows ->

The Avengers

The Avengers

The Avengers

Which was fine with me while I knew that each entry corresponded to a season, and seasons were in ascending order. But in some cases the seasons seemed to come out in a random order, and I puzzled over it for ages (well, I like puzzles). Had I tagged badly, and it was sorting by release dates? Were the most recently added to iTunes showing up first? Actually it turns out it was none of this. You might have entered the season number in iTunes and have it all showing up correctly there, and when you check the tags you see the correct seasons too, but to get Front Row to read it you’ve got to force iTunes to write it to some other place (I’ve no idea where) by, for example, renaming the show temporarily and then naming it back to it’s correct name. It’s inconvenient (and a disappointingly mundane resolution to the puzzle) but at least it works until Apple release a proper fix. If they ever fix Front Row.

Incidentally if you’re finding some of your TV Shows are showing up as movies (as well as TV shows) in Front Row, despite being correctly categorised in iTunes, this similar workaround suggests changing the media kind to podcast and then back to TV show.